Thursday, July 24, 2014

When I was a kid, transforming Jazz from car to bot seemed more complicated. [Photo credit: Rodimuspower Master of Transformers. According to his Flickr profile he's male and single. I think Steve Carell made a movie about him.]

Jazz was one of my favorite Autobots. I can barely remember, but I think I liked Optimus Prime the most. Jazz, though. Jazz was the Autobot I longed for and never could possess.

Jazz oozed cool. He looked great as a car and great as a bot. Not like Ratchet, who had a windshield for a face and transformed into an ambulance. No knock against ambulances but they don’t exactly ignite the imagination of a young boy. Not like Megatron, whose robot form gave him a giant square head, a jutting groin region with an oddly placed trigger, and weirdly shaped legs. Dat thigh gap tho. #thinspiration, amirite?

I owned Megatron, for two reasons. One, he is Optimus Prime’s adversary and I needed him to stage epic robot battles on my bed. Two, he transformed into a very real-looking Walther P-38. Look at pictures of Megatron and real Walther P-38 handguns and then take a moment to reflect on this. In 1984 you could go to a Toys R Us and buy a toy robot that transformed into a legitimate replica of a handgun with a chrome barrel and black stock, the only distinguishing feature being a purple Decepticon logo.

Kids not only could buy this toy, they could run around at school pretending to shoot their friends with it. If kids could still buy this toy, they’d have to pass a background check (how many times have you been grounded in the last 6 months?) and put Megatron in a chastity belt that transformed into a trigger lock.

I'm not the only fan who loved Jazz. Based on sales, Jazz is one of the most popular Transformers ever. So why did he have such a small role in the live action movie from 2007? He barely had any dialogue and they let Megatron kill him at the end of the movie, fulfilling the stereotype that the minority character gets it first. Sure, Bumblebee also ends up in two pieces at the end of the movie, but he survives. Cut Jazz in two and all you’re left with is a pair of oversized Cybertronian bookends.

There are signifiers of Jazz’s blackness all over. For one thing, his name is Jazz. For the original cartoon, the voice of Jazz was provided by none other than Scatman Crothers, an actual jazz man (as well as actor, comedian, guitarist, and voice-over artist). In the cartoon his language and taste in music was hipper than the rest of the Autobots. He had rhythm, apparent from his use of sound and light displays as a tool for distracting Decepticons. You would think that the clever use of chaff or explosives would be the ideal distraction, but Decepticons are programmed to expect that. A Hannah Montana concert suddenly erupting on the field of battle is something you never get used to.

Jazz isn’t the only "urban" Transformer. In the sequel, movie-goers were Al-Jolsoned by the arrival of the twins, Skids and Mudflap, the offensive pair of Autobots from Revenge of the Fallen. A lot of people were offended by these robots because they are obviously racist caricatures. But clearly, the invocation of minstrelsy here is intended to compare the plight of the Autobots, who fled their home planet to escape the Decepticons’ genocidal intentions, with the struggle of American blacks for civil rights and prosperity in a nation whose founding text defines them as less than fully human.

Nah, I’m kidding. That shit is just full on racist. Bay should never have allowed the editor to cut the scene where Mudflap wore absurdly oversized lips and sang "Mammy." I'm surprised the first shot of Skids wasn't of him doing the electric boogaloo after Maury Povich told him that "you are not the father."

Although I don’t know how Cybertronians procreate. The only Transformer that may have been a woman was the robot that transformed into a human female to seduce Sam.

As an aside, if the Transformers could transform into people this whole time, why do they bother disguising themselves as jets and trucks? As an aside from that aside, couldn’t she have just shot Sam with a small snub nosed revolver and solved a lot of the Decepticons’ problems? As another aside, is it a surprise that the only non-male Transformer is a seduction-bot? We should be praising Michael Bay that she wasn’t disguised as a beer-dispensing vagina. This is a Michael Bay movie we’re talking about. If he could cast just body parts nobody would know what Megan Fox’s face looks like.

(Actually, there are some female Autobots. The Arcee triplets. Typical of a Michael Bay film, they don’t speak.

Then they die off-screen.)

According to the lore, in spite of the fact that Transformers are autonomous robots, every Transformer has something called a "spark." It’s their life force. Their soul. If a transformer sustains too much damage, their spark leaves their body and they die. No amount of repair will restore it to life. That helps explain why it was possible to kill Jazz. EXCEPT that in the second movie we find out that there’s something called the Matrix of Leadership that has the power to resurrect any non-ethnic transformer. Sorry, Jazz. I guess you were too black for anyone to bother resurrecting you in the second movie, even though Prime hangs onto the Matrix and resurrects Sentinel Prime in the third one.

What happened to Jazz’s body, anyway? Maybe they didn’t resurrect him because they misplaced him somewhere. I ask because after Prime hands Megatron’s ass to him at the end of the first movie, you would think that would be the end of Megatron.

But no. It turns out the US military decided to stash him at the bottom of the ocean like Jason at the end of Friday the 13th part 6. I assumed that the Autobots would have found the biggest volcano on Earth and made Decepticon fondue. If they didn’t want to go that route, perhaps they could have broken him down for spare parts or let the military reverse engineer him. Whatever it was they did with him, I assumed they would make sure the son-of-a-bitch was good and dead. But that’s not how Michael Bay movies work.

Instead, the US Military, taking a nod from the practice of water-boarding, concocted some kind of elaborate "rust torture." They spent millions of dollars to chain Megatron to the seabed somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Then, to make sure nothing happened to him, they left three guys with water wings and pool noodles guarding him so that the sharks would have something to eat after the Decepticons inevitably went to retrieve him.

It’s too bad that Laserbeak wasn’t in Revenge of the Fallen. One of his shits could have transformed into a jalepeno with a light saber and wiped all of them out. (Excuse me. I meant energon saber.)

For whatever reason, the Transformers, these robotic embodiments of true non-organic intelligence, seem to be entirely unaware of their advantages as robots. Don’t they have programming? Aren’t their personalities essentially algorithms? Can’t they just upload themselves into a workstation until a new body is ready? Haven’t they heard of the cloud? Do they not have WiFi?

I have a wireless router. I can upload things to my blog when I’m on the toilet. All the Decepticons had to do was get Megatron to a Starbucks and buy a Frappuccino and Megatron could have been uploaded into Asimo until a new, more resilient, more agile body was constructed. And until then, Asimo would have been the meanest, most megalomaniacal dancing robot the Japanese ever saw. Eventually he’d fight Godzilla.

If Megatron didn’t like that option, he could have hacked one of the Autobots. Or made multiple copies of himself and hacked all of the Autobots. Come to think of it, why do they bother shooting at each other when they have all of these other delicious alternatives? The live action movie could have lasted about 15 minutes. Transformers show up on Earth, some 8-year-old Chinese kids hack them, and they use them to get all the candy they want because they’re 8 and they don’t know shit about geopolitics.

In spite of the ability to avoid the frailties of mortality, they embrace them. If the fact that Jetfire gets around on a cane is any indication, they even decide at a certain point to get osteoporosis in a world where humans have already invented Boniva. In other words, these robots are fucking dumb. If the war never started and Cybertronian society had continued to develop unimpeded, the Transformers probably would have invented robot dementia, robot HIV, and robot pedobear. (Who would transform into a van.) I guess what I’m saying is that the Transformers, as a race, aren’t terribly visionary.

For instance, why do they fire bullets? And miss? They should never miss. We can send a signal from Washington DC to launch a missile from a submarine off the coast of Yemen that will thread the needle through a half-open window in Iraq and knock the toupee off of a bald guy’s head and leave no trace except for a little sunburn on his scalp, but an advanced race of sentient robots who traversed space all the way from their dying planet, landed on Earth, scanned our vehicles and through a series of complex algorithms deduced how to reconstruct themselves so that they could fold up to look like cars and jets, can’t nail a target at 50 yards with a projectile the size of Jetfire’s enlarged prostate?

Why not have guided projectiles? Or lasers. Laser beams obviously travel at light speed, making such weapons nearly impossible to dodge. So why not just have them fire laser beams like they did in the cartoon?

Tuesday, July 08, 2014

Jack-in-the-Box commercials haven't been all that funny the last few years so I figured I'd be charitable and give them some suggestions about how to improve one of their latest ads, "Training Video."

First, they should just cut everything after the customer's head explodes.

Second, I think we all want the narrative to have some closure. That's why I suggest that the final shot of the commercial should be of the cashier. Her face and chest should be copiously confettied and she should be screaming in ego-shattering terror, hands futiley upturned, densely dappled by shards of cerebral euphemism.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Schistosoma mansoni worms, the most romantic of all parasites. These worms cause schistosomiasis, otherwise known as "snail fever." According to the Carter Center, snail fever is "second only to malaria as the most devastating parasitic disease in tropical countries." Male and female schistosoma mansoni worms mate for life, causing the production and release of hundreds of eggs that lodge into the host's organs. Like any other romantic encounter, theirs is followed by swelling and an enlarged belly. Sometimes you get lucky and bleed profusely from your urethra. It's like watching The Notebook. [Photo credit: Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences]

It's difficult to witness the commercial spectacle of Valentine's Day and not turn one's thoughts towards the subject of love, especially if, like me, you carve out a solitary existence within the shadows of others' affection. The common lament of the perpetually single is that we want to find someone to love us, so I gave it the best shot I could. In one year, I went on 21 first dates. I can't say for sure if it's harder to believe you are unloveable or to have it confirmed for you on a weekly basis by the only single women within 50 miles of you who will begrudgingly accept your invitation for coffee, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the latter.

However, it was not all for naught! In addition to a large credit card balance, I also produced this very short dictionary of romance that documents the wisdom that I went so far into debt to obtain:

af – fec – tion. n. Costs about $100 at a strip club but $15 in some alleys.

court – ship. n.

The process of wooing someone with a view towards a long-term commitment, usually marriage.

The process that a woman initiates in order to woo me away from my thoughts of a romantic connection, towards a long- term commitment to friendship, unrequited affection, and most significantly, no touching, except for those unsatisfying
friend-hugs a woman gives you when she wants to make sure you understand that there will be no other touching and
certainly no touching when either one of you is in even the most insignificant state of undress, e.g. missing a sandal or
not wearing a watch that day.

dat – ing. n. A series of events with two possible outcomes. The first: she decides that she doesn’t enjoy my company. In these cases, I never see her again. The second: she decides that she does enjoy my company. In these cases, I never see her again, because how long could that possibly last? I don't know how or why it happened in the first place and I strongly doubt I could make it happen again.

love. n.

What naïve people claim everyone is entitled to, regardless of their appearance, age, or character.

An exchange of sex for security between two young, attractive, financially secure people.

An exchange of credit card information for virtual affection between me and CCBill, typically on a monthly basis.

third date. n. An asymptotic boundary which my romantic relationships approach but never touch.

un – date – a – ble. adj.

How to tell a guy that it’s not him, it’s you, before you’ve been out on an actual date.

An evolutionary change undergone by well-adapted females upon hearing I was dating again.

All text on this website is (C) copyright Vincent Oliveri 2004-2020 unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved by the copyright holder.

Title and train image created by Amie Barnett. I am also indebted to Evan Jones for creation of my favicon. He also did the original HTML and CSS for this site; while much of that code has been replaced by the new Google template, some of his code is still in use. Many thanks to both of them for their wonderful work!